They were also friends. The friendship survived the rivalry because what they had in common was larger than what divided them. Both had come from circumstances of poverty and limited formal education. Both had found their way to artistic life through routes that the industry would not have planned for them. Both understood that what they were doing — being present in American entertainment at the level of major stars, insisting on their own dignity, refusing certain kinds of degradation — was not merely a personal career but something with implications beyond the personal.
Belafonte was, through this period, more explicitly and publicly involved in the Civil Rights Movement than Poitier. He fundraised for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He provided bail money for protesters. He maintained a close relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. that was both personal and strategic — Belafonte helped connect the movement to the resources that a major entertainer could mobilize.
Poitier was present and committed but less operationally involved. He attended the March on Washington. He expressed support for the movement’s goals. But the front-line organizational work was more Belafonte’s domain than Poitier’s.
This difference in mode did not fracture the friendship. It may have even sustained it — the fact that they were approaching the same historical moment from slightly different angles, that each had something the other didn’t, that the relationship was not competitive in the way that two people occupying identical niches can become competitive.
Buck and the Preacher, in 1972, was in some ways the fullest expression of what the friendship produced professionally. The film gave them a chance to work together, to share the screen in material that was explicitly about Black history and Black experience, to operate in a mode that the integrationist films of the 1950s and 1960s had not permitted. It was a revisionist Western, working from the tradition of the genre while also questioning that tradition from the inside.